Last week was a trying week. I’m hoping for a better one this week and so far it’s off to a great start.

Most of all I was wondering what on earth the postal services are doing – not just our Canadian Post Office but the U.S. Post office as well. First of all, it took 11 days for a letter to arrive from the Ottawa area to the St. Catharines area. Ridiculous. – Okay, I admit we had a holiday in there – so that accounts for 2 days – but what the heck – that’s still 9 days. The pony express would have been faster.

On the same note – I sell crochet patterns on-line. While most people order the pdf file that is sent by email to them, one in 10 order the hard copy version that must be mailed. If I think the Canadian postal services are bad, the U.S. I think are worse – either that or the mail is not making it out of Canada.

One of my customers placed an order back in February. I mailed her the patterns on 3 separate occasions over the course of 2 months – she did not receive any of them. Her address was confirmed twice, they were never returned to me and yet she did receive them. Ultimately I ended up refunding her the difference between the hard copies and the emailed version and sent her off the pdfs. She was happy enough, but it doesn’t say much for my reputation as a business.

So where did these 3 sets of patterns go? Has someone else received them in error? Are they lost in postal la la land?

I once received a letter that was mailed to me 11 years after it was sent. Can you believe that?

At least with email, you have a better idea of whether the recipient received your information or not. Now its time for – what was that thing called in Star Trek that could transport items from point a to point b – oh ya ‘The transporter’. If only we could build a tranporter into email. “Beam me up Scotty!”